In the field of baseball, the time spent in batting practice usually is far greater than that actually spent during a game. The necessity of batting practice is recognized by batting coaches from little league through amateur, recreational, varsity college and all stages of professional play. The need for batting practice has grown to the extent that a number of batting cages have developed including pitching machines as well as live pitchers to provide the batter with a series of pitches, as many as 600 per hour, to sharpen the batter's skills. Batting practice can take a tremendous toll on the bats used. Not only is there danger of wooden bats breaking, but they develop what is known as chipping and scuffing, as well as cracking. Metal bats produce loud sounds in a batting cage with a number of batters simultaneously practicing. Metal bats, in addition to the sound often suffer dents that make the bat unattractive, undesirable and often useless.
The batting coach often relies on the sound of the bats striking the ball as an indication of quality of the hit. The reliance on sound can be misleading, however, since often batters will try to cut the ball, that is, a downward swing to get back spin and loft. This adds particularly to the tendency to chip wooden bats and raising the grain to the extent that you can actually peel splinters off the bat.
I am a professional ball player and have instructed in batting employing batting cages for a number of years and have recognized the above problems. It occurred to me that it would be desirable to minimize the likelihood of chipping, splitting, cracking or denting of bats if it would be possible to have some kind of a protective cover that did not interfere with the batting training.
I explored the prior art and found that most of the additions to the contact zone or head region of the bat are in the form of temporary added weights of one form or another. These are often called "donuts" because of their shape and used primarily for swinging the bat in preparation for the time at the plate. They are substitute for the time honored practice of swinging two bats in preparation for one's time at bat. No attempt is made to actually strike the ball with a weight or "do-nut" in place.
Also attempts have been made to put attachments on bats to add weight distributed over the head region of the bat or its face. Examples of such devices are shown in:
U.S. Pat. No. 3,623,724 L. A. Landy Nov. 30, 1971 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,833,217 D. F. Greaney Sep. 3, 1974 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 3,944,225 D. F. Greaney Mar. 16, 1976 PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 5,024,436 S. J. Vento Jun. 18, 1991.